Several posters in recent days, including some parents, have been saying how Northeastern is only concerned about money due to the fact that they cannot afford to attend with the insufficient financial aid package that Northeastern offered. There seems to be a sense of entitlement that Northeastern owes them a low bottom line cost education. This sense of entitlement is not limited to applicants (and their parents) to Northeastern.
Northeastern is a private university with a limited endowment. They offer 100 Boston Public high school graduates each year a full ride scholarship. They also offer full ride scholarships to about 25 students from around the country through the Torch program. These students are truly low income. Not the CC notion of “My parents only make $100,000/year” low income.
Northeastern also rewards high achieving students with significant merit aid. The threshold for receiving this merit aid continues to rise.
The money has to come from somewhere! If you are middle income there are other options at state schools. In my opinion Northeastern offers a much better experience than the state flagships in the Northeast US. If you cannot afford it with a manageable amount of student loans there are many other alternatives available to you.
100% agree. Comparatively, NU’s endowment is much smaller than private schools of similar caliber. It really is pretty amazing that they manage to give out as much as they do.
Prediction: in 5 years NEU will no longer have significant merit aid. When it is a USNWR top-25 ranked university, it will seem gauche to have to bribe high stats students with $30K/yr merit scholarships. Only 3rd-tier schools have to resort to these sorts of tactics.
Also agree, @ormdad. While this is not true for everyone, the average Honors student seems to be on a noticeably different level than the non-Honors student. We have predicted all year that within the next few years, NU will basically only be admitting those at current “Honors” caliber, until that composes the entire admitted class.
If Northeastern does completely get rid of merit aid, I will be very sad to see it go - it’s why I was able to attend Northeastern. However, there is no indication that the University Scholars program will be going away, and it’s a very promising program.
I definitely plan to donate as an alum once I graduate. The scholarships they’ve given me allowed me to have an absolutely fantastic college experience that I want other students to have the chance to experience as well!
@nanotechnology my son plans to support his school and intends to pay back every cent of his scholarship so some other kid can have the opportunity this school has given him. Good for you kids!
@TomSrOfBoston do you feel better? It’s an emotional time of year and venting is good from every angle!
Just think people care enough about the school to be upset!
I got my financial aid award the other day and was blown away by how generous the grant was. It alone covered nearly half of the tuition, to say nothing of any scholarships. My family is upper middle class, but nowhere near able to afford the school without the grant. Northeastern may ostensibly have the price tag of all these huge universities but in practice it’s much cheaper.
You can rant all you want, but my son got in to Northeastern and was awarded $0 in financial aid. Northeastern is truly on some exceptional crack if they think we can afford $62k a year, especially since they know darn well via FAFSA that we have another kid in college as well. Every other college my kid has been accepted by to date has given him money, some amounts have been significant. Needless to say, everything Northeastern related is now in the trash.
On my son’s f. aid package, they stated clearly they used the CSS Profile to figure out aid rather than the FAFSA which doesn’t consider equity.
The cost difference between Northeastern and the schools that only use FAFSA is between $4500 and $5000 for us. Still, we are seriously considering Northeastern for our son. We cannot afford the 11-12K that we would need to come up with for more than 1 1/2 years, though.
We will appeal for more aid. Considering that our FAFSA EFC was $4400 and our income dropped by about 10K this year, I hope we get more. We shall see.
Perhaps cookli NU is not the school for your son. We didn’t qualify for need based aid anywhere last year, (because of some inherited assets, not because we made a lot of money). Because of this we narrowed our choices down to schools that offered our daughter merit scholarships. Fortunately for us Northeastern offered her a decent scholarship. It sounds as though they offer merit to the top 25%. If she did not receive that merit she would have chosen a different school. I wouldn’t have blamed the school for this, it would simply have been a choice we would have had to make. There is a right school for everyone. Northeastern is the perfect school for my daughter, and I’m sure there is one perfect for your son. Good luck to you.
I’d love to attend Northeastern… But their price is $45,000 for me to attend, while other similarly-priced schools are around $30,000/year for me (U of San Diego, RPI). I think they took my Dad’s income too much into account, even though he probably won’t help finance my education at all. I’ve sent them an email asking them to reconsider, but if it doesn’t change NU simply isn’t worth it for me to attend. Not blaming NU, though.
Just visiting from the NYU thread, but believe me, we get this all the time. NYU, too, varies its generosity to people based on how much they want you. If a candidate is really outstanding they will try to come as close as possible to meeting need. They offer very little merit aid at this point as the academic threshold rose and more and more applicants applied. We were lucky to get talent merit aid (no need) for older D who was a music major. Younger D is full pay, but we knew that going in when we applied ED. They might have offered some talent merit aid to her (non need) as an art major RD round, but we chose to apply ED and give her an edge in admissions. I think Northeastern is at a point that NYU was several years ago and headed in the same direction–attracting higher stat kids and needing less merit to have them attend. They will meet meet need for really high level kids, but not so much for kids that don’t make their reputation rise. As the OP said, it is a private university and it is not their goal to provide affordable education for all–if you cannot afford it, there are other options.
@cookli Anyone? Even those who are, luckily, willing and, more importantly, able to do so? I would not want to take one cent away from anyone who truly needed it to attend college when I do not need it. I don’t believe it is the same as sticker price on a car.
It’s not NU’s job to pay for our children’s education. They’re a business. Being upset that a college won’t give my kid enough to make it affordable for me is like my saying the local car dealer should drop the price on that pretty little red convertible I’ve been eyeing just because I want it. I can listen to their offer, but if they can’t drop the price low enough so it fits my budget then I have to walk away because too many others are willing to pay the higher asking price. That doesn’t reflect badly on the business; it just means that their product is unaffordable for me.
I was blown away by the amount Northeastern offered in merit aid. My son was awarded 18K/year and just got a letter saying he was named a presidential global scholar and is getting another 6K to use toward an internship. I’m not sure what schools @cookli is talking about with better aid. My son got a similar (slightly lower) offer from WPI, but absolutely nothing from BU. I think NEU is awesome - we were expecting to get anything.